Dragons and Their Boys
by Asuka Kureru
Summary: Gundam Wing, if it happened in the Temeraire universe. Series of drabbles and one-shots; gundams as dragons.
1. Chapter 1

_Gundam Wing is a mecha show about a war between the space colonies and Earth. The main characters are five fifteen-year-olds sent down to raise a fuss with their state of the art, kickass war machines._

_The Temeraire series is a Napoleon War With Dragons alternate history, where (sentient, speaking) dragons can be big as a horse or big as a whale and are bred and trained to use as warships._

_This will be a collection of ficlets and oneshots, not a proper multipart. (I know it seems that's all I write at the moment, but considering how hard it is for me to complete a multipart... eh. Better like this.)  
_

* * *

1. Wing

She'd been bred for reentry, harnessed specifically for that single instant when, kicking free of the shuttle, she would drop like a stone into Earth's gravity well, straight past all those sensors barring the way to metal and ceramics.

None of her trainers had told her it would feel as if up until that day she had never truly flown.

None of her trainers had told her it would be beautiful.

She plummeted through space, wings closed tight and neck and tail angled just right. She'd practiced and practiced for days and months and forever for this, when she slept in zero-gravity it was the stance she took, perfectly aerodynamic, but for the first time she felt the strain of it, the insistent tugging of contrary forces, turbulences she sliced through even as they pulled at her, and the rush and the speed left her blind with exultation.

In the back of her mind she calculated trajectories and timing and reentry speeds and terminal velocity, and she waited and waited for the order to open her wings and slow, and the longer it didn't come and the stronger she loved her rider for loving the terrifying exhilaration of free fall as insanely as she did.

* * *

2. Deathscythe

"See," he said, thrown negligently over his shoulder, "If you'd crushed my egg we could never have done this."

His partner laughed, head thrown back, teeth bared. He growled out a laugh to match, and dove until the tips of his wings skimmed the water, and he roared his challenge to the sea.

Here. This is mine, this wave and the next and the next, it's all mine and I'll fight you for it.

When his partner yelled his own war cry - puny, puny - and freed a hand from the reins to pump it at the sky, he flipped around and dumped him off the saddle into the sea.

* * *

3. Heavyarms

She didn't mind plodding along on the ground, going up and down and up mounds and slopes it might have taken her three seconds to fly past. She walked alongside her handler, wings furled, taking one step for the five he jogged.

They watched the scenery, green trees and tiny, tiny birds and a tiny strip of water flowing freely right there on the ground for anyone to take or bathe in. (Not that she could have put more than a foot in it, but it was the principle of the thing.) It was a lot like what he'd told her about, it wasn't new to him, but he seemed content nonetheless. He hadn't touched his gun for at least two minutes.

"That lake didn't seem so far away, from the sky," she mused, tail swishing.

She didn't mind the trip.

* * *

4. Sandrock

"Oh god, it's hot, why is it so hot. You brought me here on false pretenses."

His friend laughed, hair matted and dark with sweat so that it hardly gleamed like gold anymore. He harrumphed, groomed one of his wings pointedly and then gave in and draped it over his head to make a little shade. In a matter of minutes the heat under his wing was suffocating and he had to emerge again.

"I was bred for space!" he muttered. "Thicker skin to retain heat for days on end in hard vacuum! Not that my lungs would hold out that long, mind, serious design flaw there. And where do you bring me? A desert. A desert! I admit, it's very interesting how much the décor matches, though having your tail clambered on because it resembles a small dune is a bit disconcerting; but the heat!"

He took a big, dramatic pause, flicked the end of his tail in an elaborate pattern the likes he had seen people do with their hands. His friend laughed again, patted his muzzle.

"I'm sure we could build you a tent. A couple of poles, a light cloth, open sides to let the breeze in..."

He oozed all over his warm, warm rock and dug his claws in delicious warm sand, defensive and wary, though it had been months since he was small enough to be moved bodily. "_No_, thank you."

* * *

5. Shenlong

She had been named Long Shen Kai, even though she did not belong to the Shen breed in any strict sense. She was told her dam had been. The rest of her... Experiments. The other dragons had whispered it wherever she went. She was a thief of bloodlines, the noblest Celestial blood stolen and marred with wild, uncouth Kazilik and that plodding mutt in white scales.

Now she was named nothing and answered to nothing, not even to _his_ voice when he attempted to call her the name her true rider had used, and she wished more of her robe had inherited her false-sire's mourning colors, but the rest of her would be jade until she died.

She would never answer to Nataku again, and she wasn't going to live until her robe faded.


	2. Wing, Egg

_By the way, the ficlets won't be in strict chronological order, because... well, because I don't write them in chronological order. XD;_

_This ficlet was written for Rag Doll Witch._

* * *

"How many languages do you speak, boy?" J asked one day over his shoulder, absent-minded.

The boy wasn't sure why that question had even been asked. J already knew. "English, Japanese and Russian fluently, some Cantonese..." He frowned, thinking; what other languages... "Notions of spoken French, Spanish, Arabic..."

"Good, good."

Doctor J kept tinkering with the microscope for a minute. The boy waited.

"Dragons learn language through the shell," the man said eventually. "It'll be to our advantage that it know as many as possible. The techs have English and Japanese covered; you can start with Russian."

The boy hesitated. "Should I... give it lessons?" He had never refused an order so far - half because J never gave a task which he knew the boy physically could not complete. But he had no experience in formal education to draw on.

"No, no. Not lessons." J looked at him over his shoulder, smiled a smile the boy could not read. "Just talk to it. That'll do."

Later, when he stood in the brooding room, before the patterned eggshell, the boy thought there was nothing 'just' about any of it.

It was stuffy in the small room, the air heavy and damp. The lights were red, so that even though it was daytime in the rest of the ship, in there it felt like the middle of the night. He closed the door behind him before all the heat could get out and leaned his back against it.

The egg was waist-high, striated night blue and gold. It seemed... egg-shaped. There wasn't much else to be observed, and it wasn't like this was the first time he saw it, in any case. It hadn't changed since.

He had two hours of liberty a day, between end of lessons and sleep, and he'd decided today he could spend one of them in there instead of his bedroom, there would be little difference; only now that he was here he didn't have a clue where to start.

"... Hello," he said, and didn't feel any less awkward now that he had started. "Doctor J asked me to speak to you. He wants you to learn Russian."

He stood there in silence for another minute or three, his sweaty back sticking to warm metal.

"Russian is spoken in Russia, and a lot of countries that used to be part of it, several centuries ago. It's the largest country in the world, from Eastern Europe across all of North Asia. It spans nine time zones. ...Some areas tend to be extremely cold, and not densely inhabited."

He freed a hand to tug on his shirt, which was sticking to him, tapped the toes of his shoe against the floor thoughtfully.

"... I've never been."

The blue of the shell looked black like old tacky blood under the lamps, the gold specks orange like fire.

He spent the rest of the hour going through numbers and conjugating whatever verbs he could think of.

* * *

The day after that he borrowed a book from one of the weapon teams and read out loud. It was about socioeconomics. He finished it in three sessions, and then frowned, as he sat before the egg in the small, stuffy room.

"It wasn't very interesting, was it. It won't make you want to come out of the shell."

They tried novels next, a Regency romance full of people whose motives baffled him and a couple of murder mysteries. An autobiography. They reached the end of the available Russian texts after that.

"They're making your armament," he said. "I don't suppose gun specs would speak to you much without seeing the schematics. It's... it seems like it'll work well."

He rubbed his heel against the floor, started worrying at his laces. Might as well take his shoes off. He sweated so much otherwise. The door was locked anyway, and it was the most secure area in the whole base. He wouldn't need to run anywhere in a hurry.

"Sometimes in my head I call myself Odin Jr."

He wrapped his fingers in shoelaces, tugging back and forth.

"It's one of my oldest codenames. It's obsolete, though. Long out of date."

Pause. Breathe. The door was thick. Soundproof. The only sensors were on the egg, heartbeat monitors, pressure pads.

"I haven't been given a new one yet."

The heat and red-tinged darkness, the size of the room, gave the false impression of being... inside a sound-dampening field. Inside a... inside a shell. He wasn't sure. He wrapped his arms around his knees.

"Maybe J forgot," he said against his knees, and wasn't sure the egg could even hear him if he spoke so quietly.

He spent the rest of the hour in silence.

* * *

"Hello. Did you know, you're part Celestial. I heard it's the rarest Chinese breed. J said it meant you would be smart, at the very least. Otherwise you're mostly European. One of the names sounds French.

"I'm Japanese-European. Maybe Russian. No idea."

* * *

"Hello. Today I saw the projections for your adult appearance, based on your genome. You're... nice. To look at. Aerodynamic."

* * *

"Hello. There was another incident on L1-G15766. They brought up the death of Representative Yuy again. One of the techs told me to tell you to hurry up. He... annoyed me. If he doesn't like it he can do something on his own. Don't hurry up for him. It'll be dangerous enough without going before we're ready. Just... take the time you need."

* * *

"Hello. My training is going well. I broke my speed record on the obstacle course. We're going to remodel it.

"Your shell is getting harder, isn't it.

"I still don't know what to name you."

* * *

The hatching happened off-schedule, in the morning, interrupting his training. He came at the summons to find the egg had been moved out of the brooding room, into a wider space. The hardened shell looked weird in white light. Strange, unknown.

Everyone was crowding around, watching. It was necessary, though. In case the hatchling rejected him as its rider, decided on someone else.

He drew his shoulders back, broke past the ring of onlookers and pushed his fingers in the cracks, widened them, dropped bits of shell on the ground. He could feel something warm and alive nudging at his fingers, viscous with amniotic fluid.

The muzzle that pushed out was red and fit into his palm. It disappeared back in the shell, reappeared, pushed. The shell splintered all the way around, broke open. The boy's legs were splashed, swatted at with a soggy, awkward wing.

The dragon sat in the bottom half of its egg and watched the crowd, watched him.

"Hello," he said, in Russian, and couldn't say anything else.

"Hello," his dragon said back. "I'm hungry. You said there was this tradition."

J silently handed the boy the harness, stepped back into the crowd. His silent presence jolted him back on script.

"Yes. May I give you a name?"

"Have you found one yet?"

"... No."

The crowd was whispering. The dragon didn't pay them attention, so the boy didn't either. "A codename, then. We will change it later."

He blinked. Oh. "I... Wing." Someone tittered. He didn't care.

The dragon beat her wings, splattering the crowd with fluid; they were covered in white down, so bright. J was muttering to himself self-satisfiedly about it.

"... Wing. Yes." She bowed her neck to let the boy slip the harness over it, secure it. Her hide was soft and warm. Her eyes were thermal-beam green when she looked up at him. "May I give you a codename?"

He didn't say anything for a while, his hand in the harness. She must be famished. She asked anyway.

"Yes."

"You said Heero Yuy could have changed the world."

"...Yes."

"But Odin killed him. So he does not need his name anymore." She pondered this for a few seconds. "I think you should take it, since you're going to change the world too. Only you will not die. May I eat now?"

Most of the crew didn't speak Russian, so they didn't know what was taking so long. J did, though, but the boy didn't think to look at him until after he had nodded his acceptance, because he couldn't speak. J didn't say a thing about it, though, just handed him the bucket with all the meat inside and herded the crowd away.

Heero sat on the floor and fed his dragon in silence, his hand on a blue-and-white, velvety hide, until she fell asleep.


	3. no name, preTrowa

He woke in the middle of the night to a man in white coat leaning over him, hand stretched out toward his shoulder.

"_Ohfuckdon't_" were the first words that made sense in the middle of a torrent of whispery babbling. No-name gave a slow blink and took the point of his knife off the man's neck. He recognized him; head scientist's right hand man. Friedriks.

Three in the morning and some change, station-time. He sat up on his bunk as the man stumbled back and smoothed his coat.

Friedriks looked tense. But not ashamed, like a guy caught trying to slip in a teenage boy's bunk in the middle of the night ought to be.

"Corridor," Friedriks whispered. No-name considered it, then shrugged, slipped off his bunk straight into his old combat boots, and padded silently after him. No doubt they'd woken up other mechanics; it wasn't no-name's problem. They'd fall back asleep if nothing else happened.

The dormitory door sealed closed. Arms crossed casually, knife still in hand, he stood in the gloom of night-lights and waited for Friedriks to notice he wasn't following.

"We've got no time!" the man hissed. No-name shrugged. He could have spoken, but being woken up in the middle of the night made him edgy, and the adrenaline jolt still running in his veins didn't especially dispose him to friendliness.

"Alright, fine, fine. You're pretty good with weapon systems. Resourceful. How old are you? Not eighteen, don't even try it. Whatever, doesn't matter."

"What _does _matter?"

"Listen, it's sanctioned by Doktor S. He'll explain."

"Is it sanctioned by the base commander?"

Aha, he thought, thoroughly unsurprised, as the man's face twitched. It wasn't.

"I'm going back to bed." He turned away.

"Do you want your own dragon?"

Doktor S's voice stopped him first - hadn't heard him coming, bad for survival - but the words were what made him turn around, against his best judgment.

Showing people that you had buttons to push only ensured that they keep pushing them.

"There's only one egg on this station," no-name said; something they both knew, but everyone also knew the egg was to be someone else's - had been tailor-made for someone else. It wasn't like Trowa Dekim Barton the Fourth, of the Barton Foundation, was especially secretive or modest about it.

Doktor S gave him a heavy-lidded look, and then a small, lopsided smile. "Can't raise him on the radio, and he's not in his quarters."

No-name was sure they'd tried very hard. Yeah. And he had talon-sheaths for sale, made in L2, guaranteed authentic silver-and-ivory.

A dragon of his own. He'd... mentioned he liked animals, once, mostly because not answering would have made Trowa keep pushing. (He liked them much better than people, was what he hadn't mentioned.) The scientists didn't, for some reason, want Trowa Barton to captain the dragonet, and they couldn't afford to have it go masterless and feral on a space station, especially since so much money and time had been sunk in its genetic engineering; if no one captained it, would it be killed and used for cloning samples? Locked in a cage?

He could see their point of view. Better some random mechanic with no agenda of his own and a liking for animals (and who was, apparently, able to take care of the dragon's armament on its own) than Trowa Barton; but if no-name said no, they'd just go and find someone else. Anyone but Trowa Barton.

He shouldn't get involved. Sounded dangerous. And when Trowa woke up and found out, he was bound to go berserk on no-name and anyone else remotely involved.

He already knew too much, anyway, just from this little discussion, so why not.

"The Bartons won't like it," he said, even as he took his first steps toward the waiting scientists.

"The Bartons won't know about it," Doktor S replied. "If we're lucky."

No-name arched a doubtful eyebrow.

"You won't have to care long, boy." The man rested a hand on his shoulder, totally ignoring the knife still in his hand. "Your dragon can survive in space. There's nothing that can trap you."


End file.
